NEW SCIENCE: Menopause Muscle Loss Prevention

Stop the menopause muscle loss. Menopause muscle loss prevention involves first knowing the mechanisms for the loss and then addressing what to do about it. This episode shares both the science and the methods that I found to be useful for preventing, gaining, and/or regaining muscle. You're in perimenopause, menopause, Menopause or post-menopause, and you're not slowing down, you're just getting started. But the old rules don't apply anymore. The workouts that worked before, they're working against you now. The advice you've been given, incomplete at best. I'm Debra Atkinson, and I'm the founder of Flipping 50, the pioneer in fitness for women in midlife. For more than 40 years, I've been in the trenches with women just like you, and for the last 12, right here on this podcast. And, and the founder of Flipping 50: The Stronger Way app and membership. Welcome to Flipping 50: The Stronger Way, where science meets strength, where you'll find the tools, research, and real talk to build the body and the life you want in your second half. Each week, you'll get evidence-based exercise and nutrition strategies, conversations with leading experts, and honest answers to the questions your doctor didn't get answers to in medical school and doesn't have time to answer in an appointment. This is your show. Let's get stronger. A new study published in the Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia, and Muscle, February of 2026. So really hot off the press. In fact, I wrote to our subscribers, if you're not behind that, you might wanna check out flipping50.com to get on the subscriber list to get the first knowledge and tip. Of the Science that goes out every Sunday after I have had my nose buried into science on Science Saturdays. But we're talking today about the insight we've got from this study about differences in muscle turnover in genders and pre- and postmenopausal women. There are both insights and strong implications for future research needs. And here's what we're doing. So this was not a study that took subjects. This was a longitudinal and cross-sectional look at studies that show loss of muscle mass in perimenopause was 2.5%, and in postmenopause, 5.7%. And I want to stop for a moment. Let me pause and give you this. So in previous masterclasses, lectures, and even in our Flipping 50 Menopause Fitness Specialist course, I have thrown out the number from other science that suggests between early and late stage perimenopause, the loss can be a percentage of like 27% of muscle mass, but that is a different kind of a number and figuration. So we're talking about total and absolute here today and something quite different in the other one. And that could get confusing, but I want you to stay focused with me right here on the 2.5% during perimenopause and postmenopause cumulative effect of 5.7%. Remember that those are percentages based on an average number of— that means people who've lost more and people who's lost, lost less. Estradiol has a role in suppressing muscle protein breakdown. To refresh your memory, we are— if you are thinking about there's a fence down the middle of the road and on one side we're in muscle protein synthesis, meaning we're building up, we're boosting our muscle and/or we're simply thriving and holding onto it. On the other side is muscle protein breakdown, meaning the turnover, the use of protein by every cell in our body, not just our muscles, is so great that it counters or beats, trumps that that is muscle protein synthesis. So the turnover rate is just far higher and we're losing. That's the scoreboard over there. But the fence, I want you to know, you're not really ever just maintaining. You're probably over there or over here or over there or over here. It's paper thin. But I want you to just tap into that and hear what I'm saying again. Estradiol has a role in suppressing breakdown. It's protective, which means that post-menopause there may be a greater breakdown because the loss or lack of the estradiol. There's also a reduced or lack of response to the things that typically build muscle. Let me explain that. So for you, if you're listening, and you're not lifting yet, the reason you're not gaining muscle and you're breaking down is because you're not doing anything to counter it. That's an easier one. But for those of you who are listening and feel like, "Ah, I'm preaching to the choir," like you're thinking, "I'm the choir, hello, I'm singing the tunes about eating more protein, trying to get some sleep." And the two things really most involved in muscle protein synthesis are eating adequate protein per meal. It's a dose-response and resistance training. But here's what happens. There is a reduced or lack of response to these things, and that means that they contribute to declining muscle in older women. Older being the definitive word here. And it may be happening for you at 55, to another woman, maybe not till 60 or 65. But those things would be there's a blunted anabolic response to nutrition. There is a blunted anabolic response to exercise. I'm going to come back to each of these. And there's increased sedentary time and there's reduced physical activity. And although those might seem like, "Well, that's one and the same," yes and. So let me break down each one of these first. The blunted anabolic response. So anabolic versus catabolic. Anabolic is building up, that contributes to muscle protein synthesis. Catabolic means breakdown, contributing to the other side of the fence where we're in muscle protein breakdown. And we have certain hormones, namely, that leave the building. We have declining estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, growth hormone. There are more, I could go on, but most related to muscle protein synthesis would be estrogen or estradiol, testosterone, and growth hormone. And as those go down, that means we're not getting any help. There's nobody on the team there to rely on, and more of it lies purely on us and our habits. We have to work a little harder. When you have a blunted anabolic response to nutrition, what that means is when we had a high protein meal prior to menopause, and high is a key factor here. It didn't have to be that high. We could look at protein and we were okay. Now that's probably more an 18-year-old boy, but when we were in our 20s or even 30s, our hormones were at levels that, you know, we could get by with 20 grams, 25 grams per meal, and we were probably just fine. However, now we don't have this support. Our hormones are changing. So the food we eat, the things we do— little did we know we were doing that. We weren't doing it consciously. Today's women who are 25 and 30 may be doing that consciously, but I think I'm safe to say that most of us did not know collectively that we were doing that. In fact, we were far more concerned at that moment in time— I speak for myself, but if I may, potentially you, that we were far more concerned about going low-fat and, you know, no sugar. I remember, you know, doing things like walking into the frozen yogurt shop for a treat, right? If it was low sugar and low fat, I was in. That— those were— I've narrowed my choices. It's one of these. That's what I'm doing. So that's where we were. We were not thinking, how much protein is in this? Right? It just wasn't a factor. So we're not going to respond as well to nutrition when we have high protein. We can get a protein synthesis response that's positive, but it's going to take more than it ever did before. So in our 20s, 30s, maybe we got by with 20, 25, even 30. But as we get older, that number needs to climb. And if you're postmenopausal, it's probably a lot closer to 40. The need that you have for minimum at meal. You can eat more than that, and it may be beneficial for you to do so, but that 20 is probably not going to do it. And that's wherein if you're eating the same way you used to eat and you say it's not working, that's potentially a reason to say, "You know what? I actually need to change what I'm doing so I'm not eating the same way." We also have that blunted anabolic response to exercise, meaning again, it defaults right back to that statement that you said, I said, we thought, or we're thinking, "What I'm doing isn't working." And I, I want to tell you, and I'll just be very transparent, I'm having a moment like that right now. So I'm 62. I am, uh, 6 years now, just 6 years this June, literally post-menopause. And for a while I was like doing well. And I want, I want everybody here to know it or recognize it, that this will be true for you too, most likely. But what I want you to do is catch it and realize we can't get comfortable because we're always going to need to change. And it's not necessarily, although we have this anabolic response, it's not necessarily exactly like your protein and always got I eat more. We also have to say, my ligaments, my tendons, my, you know, muscle, my adrenals and cortisol. I've got to factor all of those in and my ability to recover. And if I have too much inflammation, too much stress, too much cortisol, even my blood test looks great, but I feel fluffy and puffy and the scale is not saying more fat or more muscle. There is something in that mystery. It's usually inflammation. Drop the inflammation and you probably will find you once again are able to lose the weight. I will tell you that friends who run weight-loss programs inevitably will do this. They have people not exercise at all at the beginning. And I don't love that, you might have guessed. However, I do when we do a 10-day Hot Not Bothered Challenge. By the way, we have one coming up. If you're not convinced you need to do it, you have time to think about it, but we usually do that in the beginning of June. So realize if you need a reset and you need somebody to walk you through the why, I share the science with you every single day before you do the exercise, during, and before you even get started, why it's helping your hormones to do this. We've got to get the inflammation down before pushing pushing the accelerator on more muscle or doing things that will help you gain it will work. It's really important to consider that. So we do need more exercise, but sometimes it has to be more better. Okay. I know that statement, I don't know where I first said it, but more better is better than just more. What I mean by that is reaching muscle fatigue will be important. It's true. But again, first we may need to bring down the inflammation. Inflammation and then create the stimulus for the muscle. But it's not going to be always heavy, every time heavy, every time hard and intense. You have to cycle those things. And for beginners, the recent changes to the American College of Sports Medicine guidelines on resistance training for healthy adults suggested twice weekly. It doesn't matter. All the details don't matter as much. And that is true. However, friends, if you have gone all the way, going back to holding hands is nice, but it's not the same. Can we agree on that? And exercise is the same way. If you have done intense and you've lifted heavy, you will find that going back to lifting lighter and/or moderately and reaching muscular fatigue sometimes is really the smartest thing you can do. Cycle that down and up and surprise your body. It's a little like if you've dieted before and you've dieted yourself into a hole where you now you're barely eating anything, you're doing such a short window because you've gotten carried away with fasting that you can't possibly eat enough micronutrients to sustain yourself. And it's not working anymore anyway. Maybe you're putting on weight. Similarly with exercise, you can't always go hard or always go heavy, or you will find your your body is like, "I am freaking bored with this," and it's not going to respond again. It may not be that it leads you to fatigue or injury, but it may be that it leads you just to nowhere. You're doing the work and you're— there's nothing. There's not the after the workout, "I feel really great. I feel good about what I accomplished." Instead, you just feel, "Nah." You know, it's there. And again, your body will adapt. So if you keep escalating, like any drug response, you won't get the same result anymore. In fact, you'll get a worse result. Not what we're after, right? I think we can immigrate. This episode is sponsored by the Flipping 50 Menopause Fitness Specialist. It is the framework that we designed our entire membership and program based on. Since 2013, I've been developing that after 30 of working with women in midlife. That was born, and in 2018 we rolled out the Menopause Fitness Specialist to train other fitness and health pros on how to actually prescribe exercise. Here's where we're going next, in case you want to get started now, that we're actually training physicians on exercise prescription, knowing they get very little of it in medical school and hoping that it also bridges the gap for you who may be a fitness or health professional or want to be, who works with women in menopause, because there is so much demand and so much room for you right now. If you are working with women in menopause but not getting all the results, don't have a reliable, predictable framework that gets you results over and over that people know, like, and trust, Come and talk to us. We'll put the link in the show notes for today. That's the Flipping 50 Menopause Fitness Specialist. And if you want to head on over to fitnessmarketingacademy.com, it's where we have all of the content dedicated to you, health and fitness pros. So let me go into the next two, the last two. So that was blended anabolic response to both nutrition and exercise. The increase in sedentary time I think it's just easy that in contemporary life most of us do become more sedentary. We sit more. We sit because life has become easy. Remote controls, we've got an app for that. And you don't have to go get your groceries, you can order them. You can pick it up, you know, at Target on the curb. You don't have to go into the store. And we all think that's great. Oh good, don't have to be around people. Don't have to spend the time, but we're also not getting as many steps. That's why we have to walk, we have to exercise, because we're skipping the other things, the part of life that is movement. So there is more sedentary time if you just look collectively. Then you might feel you're an anomaly, no, it's not true for you, and that might be true. So I want to give a nod and a shout out to you if you are constantly moving, you are always up. It's just there is a need for you to look closely at, is that really true? Like, you now to you 10 or 20 years ago, is that true? Are you more active? And I'm not just talking about your exercise time, talking about the 23, or maybe we say 16, your other waking hours during the day. You have to be active. You have to be up and down and moving. And I know you may have a desk job, but you can still stand, you can still get up and walk down the hall and give yourself breaks. And those little things add up and are important. Last but not least is reduced physical activity. Now we're talking more about that conscious go get a walk in, not just the break up your sedentary time kind of thing, but we're really talking, you know, physical activity, playing sports, having fun, being more just an active person, I would say. And I think this happens when if you're not taking care of yourself, you suddenly turn around and you're hesitating. You're thinking twice about doing things. You're wondering, is that a smart thing for me to do? You know, for me, it happened, you know, in looking at, um, Iron Distance Triathlons. I would love to do another one, you know, my memory would, my heart would, but the rest of me and the intelligent side of me says Oh no, why would you do that to yourself? And, you know, so you've got to look at what's the hard line, but most likely I think at this point for me, that would accelerate aging, probably going to accelerate some degeneration of joints that are coping just fine right now, but don't need a massive challenge. And, um, I think we have to look at for you relative to you. So that obviously that is a huge undertaking, but But, you know, there are even smaller things in all of our lives where I think we begin to think, "Should I do that?" Or, you know what, "I have all the groceries I need. I'm not going to go outside. I don't need to go for a walk. I'll just take the dog out around the house in the snow." And we start getting less and less. I noticed after a month and a half here, I was getting 6,000 steps a day less. Because I'd moved and it was cold. I'm not used to cold. I mean, it, you know, I'd been out of it for about 5 years and that's about enough apparently to ruin it you. So I've got to adapt and I had to buy myself some new boots and traction shoes and get on with it and get back out there because that was a shock. 6,000 less steps a day. Not good. But that is an example of reduced physical activity and different reasons why we might. So postmenopausal women show blunted anabolic response to resistance exercise. And though it's an obvious solution to recommend higher volumes of exercise to elicit more hypertrophic responses and prevent sarcopenia, here's what I say to this. My hand is like up, like, stop. Hold the presses. That advice can ignore the need for recovery. Together with anaerobic or anabolic resistance— I'm sorry, recovery capacity is diminished. So we have to walk this walk carefully between get enough exercise and get enough recovery. We have to juggle that need for stimulus from both sides. In order for us to benefit from the work itself. More studies are needed to show hormone therapy supports in mitigation of menopause symptom management improves this anabolic resistance and this lack or loss of exercise, the reduction in physical activity. But anecdotally, I can say this here at Flipping 50 over the last 12 years, we've seen it. Women who are choosing hormone therapy do have greater efficacy, if only because they're able to comply better because of symptom management. And by symptoms, there are so many things we could be talking about here, including the belly fat is a symptom. It's a symptom that you've got more cortisol receptors, like 40 times more in your belly than premenopause. It's the only thing that goes up during menopause, the only hormone that goes up. And so not great, right? But we have to look at hot flashes, night sweats, sleep loss otherwise, and brain fog. And how do they interfere with your motivation, your ability to comply with exercise, even if you want to, even if you were— before now you were a very active woman and you loved it. You think of somebody— you think of yourself as somebody who is— exercise is a part of my life, like a part of who I am. And we still are seeing women in that boat who just like, this is such a shock to me, like I don't even recognize myself. But we don't know for sure without more studies. The conclusion that researchers in this particular study in February said is we don't know. For sure that hormone therapy will improve muscle indirectly because of the improvement of symptoms until they can create that causation relationship with a good study. I think with all of the science that I've shared here over now more than a dozen years and what you've heard and you've read otherwise, we can both agree that It's pretty certain that hormone therapy— women say it's life-changing, like, I will never go off of this, it changed so much. And if we are certain that that is true, then absolutely we're going to find we benefit in ways that we're doing the things we want or intended to do anyway, but just couldn't— we couldn't muster the energy, couldn't muster the the time, the productivity needed to plan it. And now with hormone therapy, potentially more and more women will and will be exposed. So we need more studies showing if it's symptom mitigation or if that muscle protein breakdown is reduced with hormone therapy. Those are two different things potentially. The outcome may be the same, but what we don't know is what was it which caused it. So what I have coming up here is some support for you if you feel like, "This is true for me." In response to the lower response that we get to nutrition, the anabolic resistance to nutrition, you want to make sure that you're getting 30 to 40 grams grams minimum per meal. Now you can get more, and those old adages of you're only going to absorb so much, they're not so true. You will probably do better that you have a dose several times spread throughout the day. However, the body can absorb and take it in, and it's going to be more like a time release. I would suggest that for women in midlife, we know that it's not just about our ability to use protein is also about our ability to decrease cravings by increasing satiety, our ability to stabilize blood sugar. And those things around the clock, meaning equal doses through— spread throughout the day, really do matter, probably. And even though there may be a ceiling, according to some recent science shared by Dr. Stuart Phillips, about there's a lid, you know, at about 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight that you may not gain anything more of muscle strength and muscle mass. However, if we look at it from the lens of, but what about, you know, supporting blood sugar control and satiety, decreasing cravings, that still bears some thought. And it also is tied to the ability to increase fat burning because of the thermogenic effect of protein. And that also very important consideration for women in midlife. So there's that. You got to hit that, and you do that with, say, protein stacking as a habit. That means start your day with protein, Higher protein meal, low carb breakfast for sure. Plan your plate all throughout the day around protein and consume protein first at the meal if you're struggling to get the protein in. Improve your gut health by monitoring symptoms like gas, bloating, constipation, or diarrhea and handling them directly, like breaking down your protein. If you're bloated after meals higher in protein, that's a sign you can try betaine HCL. Or digestive enzymes. And the one I love is Masszymes by Bioptimizers. You can use code FLIPPING50 for 15% off your order. I promise this, you're gonna love it. If you need a digestive enzyme, it has 4 times the protease, which is the enzyme that helps break down protein. It was a game changer for me. If you have an inability to consume enough protein, maybe because you're getting full too fast or you're nauseous because of potentially a shot or medication, supplement with clean whole food added smoothies. The liquid shake or smoothie, and I don't mean a commercial brand with ingredients you can't pronounce or maltodextrin in them. I mean, I can get a clean protein powder and I realize that that is a product that has been produced in a plant. However, the cleaner kinds of products really are supplemental and can be very beneficial at times like this. It's hard to eat it all, you don't have time or won't make the time, and then add real food to it. Put in your greens if you want to, or your riced cauliflower and your sweet potato, and put in your resistant starches and fiber and get a meal in that vessel that takes you 2 minutes or less. If you are fasting intentionally or you're consuming too little protein because of such a short window, again, liquid support that is high in essential amino acids can really be helpful here. A product we have just started within the last year and a half called Burn Boost is actually really great for this. So it provides butyrate, which helps blood sugar levels stabilization, helps your gut lining. And Burn Boost also contains leucine, a high dose of leucine, as if you were having a meal even if you're not. But then it boosts your ketones, so you're in a fat-burning state. To work on your gut lining, again, butyrate. I feel like this is gonna be something we talk about more in 2026. I'm using it not only in our product on days I choose to fast a little bit longer and do light exercise, by the way, on those days early, but my gut lining, I've been using sodium butyrate to support my gut lining. And my telltale sign is always skin. Right now, you know, unfortunately you can't see me, I'm not on smell-o-vision or television, but I will get breakouts and it just suggests to me my gut needs a little bit of TLC. So I'm using butyrate and it is from BodyBio so that it gets into the gut. It makes it all the way through to get where it needs to go. You can use code Debra Atkinson and that link will be in the show notes for a 20% discount, significant. If you lack fiber, and again, this can come from your fasting over time and/or your gut is destroyed and you're gassy and bloating anyway, and there's no way you wanna take in more fiber, support your microbiome because it needs the diversity from different foods and fiber. I am currently using something intended to support your gut with active strains of gut support like acromania. And I think, um, that's not even it— acromancia. Like, I mean, I'm such a science junkie, not in this realm, but you are going to hear far more about this. It's like something we need in order to inspire our own GLP, but we've got to get at it and support it. And I want to test it a little bit longer before I share. Many of you know I don't share anything that I don't use, like, and trust myself. So that's an important distinction I want to make sure that we both make here. So in regards to overcoming anabolic resistance to exercise, you can add another set during any workout. Say you're using squats, then you would add— instead of 3 sets, you'd do 4. If you were doing 4, you might add a 5th. And you could go up to 6. After that, it starts to get a little crazy. You probably need another exercise. Variety might be better, or that's the other one, you could add another exercise. So say you're doing squats and lunges and hamstring curls, maybe you add a deadlift or a hip thrust. So you're again using major muscle groups and compound exercises. That ensures you increase the volume at the workout, but you also get the recovery time in between. That I favor far more than just add a third or add a fourth day. That's not necessarily always a good idea if you're struggling to recover in between. And the most important thing, by the way, is your leg muscles. So your quads, top of thigh, hamstrings in the back, and the glutes for your lower body. And for your upper body, your chest muscles and your back muscles, latissimus dorsi and trapezius, the larger two of those. Combining your lower and your upper body exercises makes it interesting, but it does not serve either your lower or your upper body well. Your lower body— and what I mean by that is not within the same workout in upper or lower body. Perfectly fine. I prefer a total body, honestly. I think it is a better metabolism boost. We raise the roof so high, give you plenty of time to recover in between, which is also important. And then your activity level is really high between as well. Right now, I will admit I am playing with— I'm testing, and I feel like I'm taking one for the team because I will give you early results right here. I don't love it, but I am doing 2 a week upper body, 2 a week lower body, and I will be a little stronger here. I hate it, if you want to know the truth. I don't like it. I don't feel like I get enough of an elevation of metabolism after any of the workouts. It is a pain in the arse to get myself to do it and set aside the time. I can easily find time twice a week to go get a really high-quality total body, and I look forward to it by the time it rolls around. These, I am like, it's a chore. It's just a pain in the— yeah, it's not helping. And it was a change. So I actually thought, okay, I'm gonna jog this. I feel like I'm getting less results, fewer results, 3 weeks in than I was doing 2 time-a-week workouts and being otherwise very active between. But what I mean— nothing wrong with that, by the way— but what I mean by combining upper and lower body is that that in one workout. Say you're doing a squat to a, a thrust overhead, a shoulder press. Don't do it. Do you know why? If you can do that, your upper body clearly is not as strong as your lower body. Can we agree? You don't chest press what you squat, nowhere close to it. And if you squat and then press We have demonstrated that you're not doing enough weight for your lower body, and you are probably doing too much for your, your upper body, but with momentum, it's one or the other or both. And so nothing is really served. The best good that does the most good is your core. So yes, there's a place where you might wanna do that, but I would do that with a really lightweight. Really enough to feel you've done something, but your speed and your effort are really what's going to make the difference there. You know, you can perform that move with nothing in your hands and you can make it get you breathless, and then it becomes a metabolic-enhancing exercise. But I don't like you saying, I'm going to reach muscle fatigue, because you're not. You're not going to reach muscle fatigue if you're doing a squat to a press overhead. Your lower body's not reaching fatigue. Your upper body's not reaching fatigue overall. You may get a little winded, but that's not the same as stimulating your muscle for your metabolism's purpose. Okay. Uh, next for exercise support would be back to supplements. Take creatine daily to boost your results. If you're not getting results, creatine has been proven. It's the most widely studied supplement out there. And a lot of experts will say, I don't have very much on my shelf, but that's one I do. So there's that. Also, try short-term for muscle boosting. And here's my story on this: a product called Yoked. You can also get this in a clinical form, it's called MyosMD, and I've used both products. They're essentially the same. The MyosMD has no flavor, so you can much more easily add it to smoothies or shakes if you wanted to without tasting it. The yolked product, and it's what it sounds like, egg yolk with an -ed, yolked. I used it for 3 months and I did this in the fall, actually right before I moved. And so I remember, I think I had 4 or 5 of them left and I was driving with them. So we stayed at 2 Airbnbs on the way, driving for 3 days, and then finally stayed in an air mattress in my new house once we landed. But I remember having them in a baggie, so I literally finished them like November 20th. And, um, I gained 2 pounds of muscle over 3 months. Now you may say, well, that doesn't sound very much. That's pretty much That's a lot, actually, for someone who's, you know, 130 pounds. My muscle mass went from 56 pounds to 58 pounds. It's still hovering right there, 58 pounds. And, you know, you and I get on the scale any given day, it's our hydration will impact what we see there. But I gained it. I went off the yolk. I'm not using it anymore and sustained it. It's not like the effects are only if you're using it. However, I'm ordering it again. And right now, if you're listening to this, act now because you can get it too. It's on a huge sale, but you can do blue light special. Like, you can go get the sale and use code FLIPPING50TV, flipping 5-0 TV, and you can use that on top of the sale. And it is ridiculously affordable for you to do that. So you're gonna get it for like a dollar something per day, but take it for a month. And if you're really smart, because you're like, okay, I'm gonna try this, and trust me, I would grab 3 months' worth right now while it's on a huge sale. You're probably not going to see enough change in a simple month. I'm only gonna do it for a month because I already got results. I'm already lifting. I just want a little bit more of a boost. And I'll make a concerted effort with everything else I'm doing as well. So think about that. If I were going to be bedridden, meaning maybe I was going to have surgery on this bunion, I'm contemplating that, I'm going to be off my feet for a little while, exercising maybe, but not in the way I want to with high impact or walking. Uh, certainly no interval sprinting, a lot less lifting. I would absolutely do this as insurance if I were ill and able to tolerate it, or I were recovering from an illness and I wanted to get that muscle back very quickly. I would absolutely add to this, but I will cycle through Yoked regularly. Next or last here in this one for exercise is surrounding your exercise. Exercise, bookending it pre and post with protein. And, and it goes to say, I hope that you're doing this dose early lunch, dinner, throughout the day. You're eating protein to boost blood sugar stabilization, your satiety, your mood, your brain function, help every cell in your body. However, also pairing it with before and after exercise. Giving it purpose. But also, we've done previous episodes— one to date, but we'll have her back— with Abby Smith Ryan. She shared a study of protein consumption prior to exercise. So even cardiovascular exercise, which is less usual, helped to preserve muscle protein breakdown in exercise and And it also found that total energy expenditure during the workout was higher when subjects were fed and fed protein specifically in this study before their workout. That, that kind of information is not new. I've shared for 3 decades that total energy expenditure during a workout and the effort, the ability to go faster or work at your capacity to go heavier or work at your capacity or do more reps is always better comparing fasted to— or fed to fasted before workouts. If you are one of those people who's just like, I don't like anything in my stomach before I eat, I used to be you and I get it. But when I gradually kind of weaned myself into becoming somebody who ate before exercise, my stomach was so much happier. And if you are a runner, you will identify with this. We run, we jostle the stomach more than some activities, more than swimming, more than walking, more than hiking, more than lifting. And so runner's gut is no joke. Every time you go a new mileage, you come back and a lot of runners experience gastric upset, namely diarrhea. And my gut was just so much happier when it was fed both during and after It was just a night and day difference. So try it. Don't just say, no, no, no, this is true for me. You will find that your energy expenditure is far greater, that you feel stronger, you feel better, and potentially that means you're working at capacity and you will get better results. So there you have it. Your science, day 4, hot off the press. Kinds of studies and a breakdown of what this study found. So unlike some of the other science that we share here, this wasn't a, here were the subjects, here's what the protocol was, here's what happened. This was more of a longitudinal study. And we love these because these are so representative of over time, this is what we've seen. And now we're looking not just at one small study that we might be doing, doing, but we're looking at collectively all these studies together prove. So it is a great use of resources already existing in science and pulling them all together. So I would be thrilled to hear from you. I'd love to know if anything here resonated with you. If you're looking for support, in the show notes for today. It will read a lot like a blog if you'd prefer to read it. All of the links will be in this post so that you can get there from them. And I highly recommend that if you need to troubleshoot, that you take a pause and say, "What is it and what do I need to test?" rather than turn your world upside down and change your exercise, change your nutrition, What one thing do you want to target? And commit to doing it diligently for a month because the number one thing that I hear in feedback when I'm asking, what have you tried and how did it go, are, well, I, when I, when I did that, when I remembered to use that, it didn't really help. Right. And that's not really evidence that we can rule something out. You've got to try consistently. For a period of time to know if something does or does not work. Thank you so much for listening. If you are helped by the content here on this podcast, I so hope that you will share this with a friend so that you and I are surrounded by others who are also going to live longer, stronger. The information shared on Flipping 50 the Stronger Way is for educational and informational purposes only and not intended as a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult your physician or qualified healthcare provider before beginning any exercise program, making changes to your diet, or adjusting any medications or supplements. Individual results may vary. Debra Atkinson and Flipping 50 are not responsible for any injury or adverse outcomes resulting from information presented on this podcast.